In a new paper, University of Maryland law professor Robert Condlin takes aim at the “practice ready” concept, arguing that it’s a nostrum that won’t cure the ills of legal education.

Mr. Condlin’s basic point is that the market forces roiling BigLaw
are beyond the control of law schools and that the second-guessing about
what they ought to be teaching is a “non sequitur.” He writes:

Law schools cannot revive the labor market, or improve
the employment prospects of their graduates, by providing a different
type of education. Placing students in jobs is principally a function of
a school’s academic reputation, not its curriculum, and the legal labor
market will rebound only after the market as a whole has rebounded (and
perhaps not then).

But Mr. Condlin doesn’t stop there. He calls the concept of a practice-ready graduate a “millennialist fantasy.”

For one, he says, the range of skills needed to prepare law students
for the private market is too large. BigLaw, smaller firms, and
government work all require different skills. But law schools “cannot
target sub-categories of the settings because students will not know
what types of practice they will enter when they graduate,” he writes.

Mr. Condlin also says it’s not even clear what it means to be
practice ready, asking. “Must they function at the level of the
‘reasonably competent practitioner,’ or is it enough that they remain
above the level of the lowest common denominator?… Are they ‘practice
ready,’ for example, if they can draft a coherent and logically
organized legal document, irrespective of the quality of its analysis.”